Web Courses Blended and Correspondence In Nursing Education
What are Correspondence Courses
Correspondence courses have long offered an educational opportunity to people whose location or job made traditional classroom education impossible. They have also been an important resource to people whose physical disabilities make it impossible to attend a regular classroom. Many people living in areas far from colleges and universities do not have the money to give up work and move to a college location.
Some people are employed in jobs that require a great deal of travel; others are required to work rotating shifts; still others live too far from a college or for other reasons are unable to meet the requirements of a traditional classroom schedule. In the past, correspondence courses offered one of the few options for college credit to all these people. Most correspondence courses provide generous deadlines for course completion.
For people who learn in ways different from those of typical students and who therefore cannot succeed in a traditional classroom, correspondence courses may facilitate learning success by allowing the student to take all the time needed to learn and may give students more latitude to use personally developed learning techniques.
Drawbacks of Correspondence Courses
The correspondence course format does have some drawbacks.
First, by its nature, it offers limited faculty support. This is a barrier to students when their reading materials are insufficient or when the student's work processes are ineffective.
Second, for many students, the student to student interaction can facilitate great learning and unfortunately, there is little to no student cohort support available in a corresponding course format.
Third, correspondence courses may not work well for highly changeable content. The materials must be prepared months or even years in advance, and updates may be difficult to incorporate into the course. For some types of courses, such as computing, advertising, and medical topics, changes in the field may occur so rapidly that the correspondence course format simply cannot keep up.
Fourth, correspondence courses have a much higher reported non completion rate than the other formats presented.
The attrition (non completion) rate of corresponding courses is as high as 80% in some reports ( Heinke & Russum , 2001). This is probably a function of all of the above factors. It may also be due to the lack of human contact. The act of communicating with a teacher on a regular basis can serve as a strong impetus to study and complete assignments so as to avoid losing face.
Web Supported Courses In Nursing Education
Web supported courses are essentially enhanced traditional courses. They generally have the same advantages and disadvantages as traditional courses. The Web is used as an additional learning opportunity and may greatly increase communication among faculty and students. It also may ease some of the problems of obtaining syllabus, class handouts, and other paper materials because most universities increasingly restrict copying expenses.
Characteristics of Web Supported Courses
It is also cheaper for the student to download these materials than to have to purchase them from the campus bookstore or copying center. Web support courses may greatly enhance the value of the course to shy students who are unlikely to speak up in class.
If the Web supports include e-mail to faculty and other students or chat room or discussion board facilities, the student's shyness may cease to be a problem. Shyness is generally a reticence in the physical presence of others. However, most shy people feel quite comfortable with computer communications.
The only disadvantage of these courses is for the few students who have no Internet access and for those who may be resistant to using computers. This is a vanishing problem as time passes, but may still be a problem for a very small number of students.
Attrition rates in these courses have not been specifically addressed in the literature. Presumably, students with no Internet access either will not sign up for these courses or will obtain Internet materials from the instructor or another student.
Blended Courses In Nursing Education
Blended courses attempt to offer all the advantages of both traditional classroom and Internet courses. They can be extremely costly for some students because they require distance students to travel to the location of the school for the intensive classes, assuming that the classroom portion of the course is offered in an intensive format. (By “intensive” is meant that the student spends one to five consecutive intensive class days in the classroom.If the classroom portion is offered throughout the semester, the course is considered Internet supported rather than a blended course).
For many students, that travel is accompanied by the need for temporary lodging, meals, and perhaps parking expenses, in addition to the tuition and travel expenses.For the kind of courses the author teaches, those travel and lodging expenses, added to tuition expense, are impossible for approximately 90% to 98% of the students.
However, this format can be extremely valuable for certain types of courses. It is especially useful for nursing courses with an assessment or skills learning component that can be taught in an intensive format.
Then the remainder of the theory material can be taught online for the rest of the semester. It allows students to obtain new hands on skills in a clinical technology lab in the intensive format, and then to go back home and perhaps work with a preceptor in their home community to practice and hone those skills in a home based clinical. At the same time, the student can continue to learn more in depth clinical theory to support the assessment skills.
Sometimes, however, the blended format is used because the teacher is not yet comfortable with online teaching. Some teachers subject their students to the expense and inconvenience of travel, lodging, and meals simply because the teacher has decided that no distance course allows the “quality” that can be delivered in a face-to-face format.
Such teachers either do not know or have no faith in the research that shows no differences in learning performance between traditional classroom courses and distance education courses for most subjects (Russell, 1998; Zolkos, 1999). In such cases, it is suggested that colleges and universities that allow teachers to force students to travel and incur lodging and meal expenses for unnecessary intensives will soon find demand for their declining courses.
Distance students will find plentiful options at schools that recognize blended courses should be reserved for those very few subjects absolutely requiring hands on teaching experiences. Such courses include content such as dissection in biology class, suturing and casting in the emergency care class, and other such skills content.
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